Secular governments and religious belief serve interchangeable functions, so strong states supplant gods.

Evidence

Strong, reliable governments might be another potent factor underlying inCREDulous atheism. We know that belief in watchful gods who monitor and intervene in human affairs may culturally spread by encouraging cooperative tendencies that allow anonymous groups of strangers to expand in size. However, reliable secular institutions such as governments, courts, and the police can serve these same functions and therefore supplant religion. We saw earlier that people perceive God and government as interchangeable sources of external control and stability. Belief in God, commitment to supernatural monitoring, and distrust of atheists all decline as societies develop strong secular alternatives to religion. Combined with conditions of existential security and relative absence of sincere religious displays, effective secular institutions undermine religion and its place in society. As religion plays a less prominent role in society, it declines further still, as there is simply less opportunity for religious displays to influence cultural learners. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 624

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This ‘God and government as interchangeable external control’ directly parallels how the Japanese state weaponizes public ritual against the priestly gaze in the reader’s analytical project.

Related

• Strong secular institutions can substitute for watchful gods in enforcing morality. (similarity 0.93)
• Secular government functions as a continuation of religious authority by other means (similarity 0.89)
• Gods and governments occupy the same functional niche in human psychology (similarity 0.88)
• Religious belief withers when governments provide the cooperation religion once supplied. (similarity 0.86)
• Religious belief cannot be understood apart from secular authority structures (similarity 0.86)
• Gods and governments may be interchangeable enforcers of cooperation (similarity 0.85)
• Perceived political instability increases belief in God and vice versa. (similarity 0.85)
• Surveillance alone cannot substitute for religion; only trusted secular authority does. (similarity 0.85)
• Surveillance only substitutes for religious authority where the state itself is trusted (similarity 0.85)
• Strong secular welfare institutions make religion socially unnecessary. (similarity 0.84)
• Secular institutions may reduce believers’ distrust of atheists by substituting for divine monitoring (similarity 0.84)
• Effective secular monitoring can erode the root cause of atheist distrust. (similarity 0.83)
• Secular institutions and watchful gods are interchangeable in enforcing cooperation and trust (similarity 0.83)
• Divine and secular authority are inseparable in explaining belief (similarity 0.83)
• Strong secular institutions substitute for and undermine belief in God (similarity 0.83)